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1 June 2025
Dear OutHistory Supporter:
Pride Month is a good time to take pride in OutHistory’s work, which you have supported in ways big and small. It’s also a good month to renew your support for that work.
In these deeply troubling times, we are proud that our February manifesto, “We Have Been Here Before,” offered a defiant message of resistance and resiliency:
Our histories have been appropriated, censored, commodified, distorted, erased, falsified, marginalized, pathologized, rejected, silenced, and simplified…. They think they can remove us from the past, present, and future, but we are historical, we are here, and we will return. They think they can take away our bathrooms, our books, our classes, our education, our health, our jobs, our passports, our stories, our histories, but we will take these back.
In March, we re-published two major historical projects that had been censored by the National Park Service.
They think they can erase trans and queer people from history, remove trans women of color from the history of Stonewall, pretend that LGBTQ+ people did not exist, did not struggle, did not fight, did not suffer, did not survive, did not thrive. If they think any of this, they have never experienced or witnessed our perseverance, our rage, our resilience, our joy.
In April, we announced our six new OutHistory Fellows, all of whom will be working on projects that we will publish in 2026.
The strength of today’s backlash is evidence of the successes we have had in recent years. Not full equality, not full liberation, but some steps in those directions. The corrupt, ignorant, and pathetic men in charge of the U.S. government would not be as cruel, hateful, and mean as they are without those successes. The magnitude of their reaction responds to the magnitude of our achievements. They cannot tolerate threats to their power, their sense of superiority, their cultural, legal, social, and political supremacy. Our past successes have made it easy for us to forget that we have been here before. We cannot forget.
In May, we worked with American Oversight to file Freedom of Information Act requests to demand transparency in recent government attacks on LGBTQ history:
There have been times when the government has been our enemy. There have been times when the government has been our friend. Most of the time, we have not been able to trust the government to protect and defend our lives, liberties, and properties. Most of the time the government has not supported our pursuits of happiness. Most of the time we have not consented to be governed in these ways. We have been here before.
In the coming months, we will publish new historical exhibits on the Black Panthers, multicultural literary anthologies, New York City art galleries, the Quakers, the Pacific Northwest Lesbian Archives, and lesbian mothers in the Southwest.
Now more than ever, we need civil society to step up. In authoritarian regimes, it can sometimes seem like everything is reducible to the individual, the family, and the state, but even in those contexts, civil society—non-governmental associations, organizations, and institutions—can serve as a reservoir of resistance. We need non-governmental organizations to archive what governments are censoring and document what we are doing in response. We need progressive corporations, individuals, and foundations to fund our resistance projects, some of which are historical in multiple senses. We need energy, labor, and money to sustain that work.
We concluded our February manifesto by declaring:
We have been here before. And we are not going away.
Every contribution you make helps ensure the truth of that promise.
Marc Stein
OutHistory Director
P.S. You should have received our fifth quarterly newsletter a few days ago. Check it out to learn more about our recent and upcoming work, our internship opportunities, and our plans for the future. We are grateful for your financial support.